“I wrote How to Be Everything with you, the multipotentialite community, in my heart. I tried to make it both inspiring and insanely practical. I poured my very best into it. I hope you love it.”

From the Amazon summary:

What do you want to be when you grow up? It’s a familiar question we’re all asked as kids.

While seemingly harmless, the question has unintended consequences. It can make you feel like you need to choose one job, one passion, one thing to be about.

Guess what? You don’t.

Having a lot of different interests, projects and curiosities doesn’t make you a “jack-of-all-trades, master of none.”

Your endless curiosity doesn’t mean you are broken or flaky.

What you are is a multipotentialite: someone with many interests and creative pursuits. And that is actually your biggest strength.

How to Be Everything helps you channel your diverse passions and skills to work for you.

Based on her popular TED talk, “Why some of us don’t have one true calling”, Emilie Wapnick flips the script on conventional career advice.

Instead of suggesting that you specialize, choose a niche or accumulate 10,000 hours of practice in a single area, Wapnick provides a practical framework for building a sustainable life around ALL of your passions.

You’ll discover:
• Why your multipotentiality is your biggest strength, especially in today’s uncertain job market.
• How to make a living and structure your work if you have many skills and interests.
• How to focus on multiple projects and make progress on all of them.
• How to handle common insecurities such as the fear of not being the best, the guilt associated with losing interest in something you used to love and the challenge of explaining “what you do” to others.

He says, “I find it difficult to choose between careers because I fear how large the choice is. Having many options available is pleasant, but to determine what I will do for many years to come is scary.”

In an interview, Emma Watson was asked if she would consider a profession outside of acting. She replied:

“The difficulty for me is that I’m interested in so many different things.

“I could never really imagine myself doing one thing, and I’m pretty sure that I’ll end up doing four or five different things.

“I want to be a Renaissance woman.

“I want to paint, and I want to write, and I want to act, and I want to just do everything.”

“When someone is called a “Renaissance man” or “Renaissance woman” today, it is meant that, rather than simply having broad interests or superficial knowledge in several fields, he or she possesses a more profound knowledge and a proficiency, or even an expertise, in at least some of those fields.”Polymath – Wikipedia, the free encyclopediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath

[Photos: Watson in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” (2012); on cover of Porter magazine, from her Facebook page.]

She attended Brown University for 18 months, then announced she was deferring her courses to promote “Harry Potter” films and other projects, and enrolled as a visitor student at Worcester College, Oxford University for the 2011–12 academic year. [Wikipedia]

One of her projects outside of acting has been helping design a collection of ethical fashion for People Tree. [‘Ethical Emma’ by Lauren Milligan, vogue.co.uk 01 February 2010.]

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Viggo Mortensen is an actor, painter, photographer, and founder of a publishing company. He “has collaborated with guitarist Buckethead on several albums…

“In 2009, he performed in The People Speak, a documentary feature film that uses dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, and speeches of everyday Americans, based on historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.” [Wikipedia]

Two photos in my video:

“Viggo Mortensen working in his artist loft on the set of A Perfect Murder (1998).

“Mortensen surprised the art director and crew when they were wondering where to get avant-garde art for David’s loft, when he hauled in several of his own works.

“He painted on set and wanted to live in the condemned factory building where they shot his loft scenes.”

“Scanners” – multitalented, multipassionate people

In my video, Barbara Sher comments: “One problem I run into with a lot of Scanners is perfectionism, which means ‘I want to do something so well that nobody will criticize me.’ That’s all it means.

“When you say ‘I’m my own worst critic,’ that’s not true; I mean you may be now, but you learned it; nobody was born criticizing themselves. Walk to a crib, when the baby knows how to talk, and say How bad do you feel about yourself, Sugar?”

The video description notes, “Barbara Sher teaches Scanners how to find those gifts and start using them right away. The first step is to realize that you’ve been misunderstood by a society of specialists: You’re not a dabbler or a dilettante. You simply need to do more than one thing in your life. Sher says, “When you’re a Scanner, one path is never enough.”

Making Dreams Happen Audio Program with Barbara Sher, Barbara Winter, Valerie Young and other successful entrepreneurs – “Whether you dream of starting your own import-export business… writing a best-selling novel… owning a dude ranch… working with kids… helping underprivileged families… whatever your passion… deep inside you know what you really love to do, the life you dream of having.

“Through the Program, you’ll learn how to harness that vision… and build a life around it that not only provides you a living… but feeds your spirit, too.”

“Imagine having a business that allows you to focus on many of your interests and use all of your skills on a regular basis.

“In Renaissance Business, you’ll learn to use your multipotentiality so that instead of it being an obstacle to income, it becomes fuel for income.”

What is a Multipotentialite? Emilie Wapnick explains.

Multipotentiality
“An educational and psychological term referring to a pattern found among intellectually gifted individuals. [Multipotentialites] generally have diverse interests across numerous domains and may be capable of success in many endeavors or professions, they are confronted with unique decisions as a result of these choices.” [Wikipedia]

One way to keep exploring and expanding your talents and interests is to take online courses.

Udemy is “the world’s largest marketplace for teaching and learning. More than 32,000 online courses on everything from programming to yoga, marketing to guitar, photography to personal development, and more.”

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Another popular site for online courses is CreativeLive – it features 1,500+ classes (free and paid) in photography, video, design, business, audio, music, crafting, software training and more.

Developing Multiple Talents: The personal side of creative expressionby Douglas Eby
"One of many reviews: "Part book about creativity, part compendium of useful tidbits, quotations and research, and part annotated bibliography, this is a wildly useful and highly entertaining resource." - Stephanie S. Tolan, fiction writer and consultant on the needs of the gifted. -- See About the book for more.